Green's function solution to subsurface light transport for BRDF computation

Abstract

This paper presents an accurate method to compute the bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) due to subsurface scattering inside the material of the objects. This computation requires iterating over the different lighting directions, and solving the integro-differential equation of light transport (scattering and absorption). Solving the light transport equation is expensive, and solving it independently for different directions adds even further to the expense. However most of the computations are very similar between directions. We make use of Green's function of the transport problem to have a better separation between computations that are independent of incident directions from those that are dependent. This allows us to avoid as much repetition in the computations as possible, thus gives us a faster BRDF computation method without any loss of accuracy. We validate our method against a standard light transport solver and use it to compute BRDF for a variety of materials.